posted 01-25- 05:32 PM               

I have heard a couple times that its coming eventually (decades?) but then you hear of some new breakthrough (like some new silicon that was just made) that says we can go a bit longer

My personal opinion is there is no limits
limits are set by humans and they are always broken

One of my thoughts on it is we might someday move over to more organics
Imagine growing your computer? what would a virus be like then haha

Imagine growing your house? Your house a living and breathing thing? like a huge tree that has been genitically programmed to grow with rooms and a natural energy gathering leaf system not only for its own existence but to power our everyday life?
it could filter your air and water for you too.

Everytime someone says you can't go faster then light i just shrug. All the old barriers are broken.

faster then sound? done
go into space? done

I have read that some people thought trains would't work cause as soon as you hit a high speed (can't remember what it was) all the air would be sucked out and everyone would die.

posted 01-27- 01:57 PM               

JT I think u have to put a time limit on that. Like how fast will they be 3 years from now.

Consider this SONYS playstation 2 (yes i love this peice of hardware) Is faster then any computer you guys have at home It is considered a supercomputer.

Sony has already stated they will be making a workstation based on the main chip from it or more specificly 4 of the emotion engines
128 bits at 6.4Gflops would be around 24 Gflops (I don't say the exact # cause there would be some loss i would think from using them in parrellel)

Is that powerfull enough for ya?

Also they have stated that there will be a new playstation in 2005(psx3) that will be 100x faster then the psx2.

and then in 2010 one that is 100x faster then the psx3.

I think there will be obsticles but they will be cercumvented.

And don't take my predicion of Organic computers lightly. They will come and they will be amazingly powerfull.

I got a question for you guys. How come we aren't using Fiber Opitic cables for hooking up our drives? Would that not be a much faster and better solution then 40 (and now 80) wires? that can be so damn tempermental.

I know it would be a bit more expensive but not crazy. Not when you see it used all over the place. Even some cheap stuff in toys and stuff. Massed produced and I can't see it costing anymore then a good 40 pin ide cable.

posted 01-31- 05:31 PM            

Fiber is used in networking over long distances because it suffers from very low latency and has very low power requirements compared to forcing a signal over copper at the same speed and distance.

As far as computer speed goes, on the metal based conducter method we will reach a limit when we hit tarnsistors that are 1 atom wide. You cant miniturize much betond that - although theoretically you could go a little farther. There are, in development now optical based computers that are 100-1000 times faster than what we currently use. These operate solely on light and never do the conversion to electrical impulses until you get to throwing up a display. Very slick stuff.

The fastest possibility on the horizon though is the "Quantum Computer". It works on some priciples of Quantum mechanics that unless you've got a PHd in the field will just make your head explode. Basically, they use subatomic particles as a computer - moving the particle to one of 3 known positions gives you the ability to do binary like calcualtions (I know - theres only 2 options in binary - but this aint your daddys binary here!). A little over a year ago they actually made this work for about 5 millionths of a second - and calculated 2+2 nearly a billion times faster than it has ever been done. It's just 2+2, but hey, you gotta start somewhere - and remember, this was their first attempt and it was really really really really fast. Give them 20 years or so and it will really be impressive.

SPanky - you gotta realize something - dedicated game console have always been faster than their contemporary computers. They are a specialized tool with only one function and can therefore optimize their chip to do one thing and do it really fast. A computer is a general purpose chip that splits itself between quite a few tasks at once and so suffers due to the need to be multi abilitied. It's kinda like doctors - a General Practioner can do open heart surgery but a Heart Surgeon will be much better at it. If you need proof look at arcade consoles - many of them are powered by a 486 with very specialized operating software and supporting hardware - and they can kick the but in the graphics department of many a current pc setup. Also, our nice friendly (well, kinda) OS's eat up alot of power - look at the Hubble Telescope - the whole shebang is controlled by a single 486 with 2MB of ram - a custom OS and blammo, you've got the most powerful research tool known to mankind, and it's fast too!.

Give an Athlon 800 to hardware engineer and say make me a gaming console and I guarantee it will blow the PSX2 out of the water... but the cost would be too high for the gaming console market, and thus it never happens.

-Stark

posted 01-31- 08:04 PM               

Stark I'm not saying use fiber for more bandwidth i'm saying use it for reliablity. I always have trouble with my hard drive cables. Once those suckers are working properly i don't like to touch them at all. they are a huge hassle. I have even used brand new ones and had problems. There is just too many connections 40-80 is way to many. I also hate the power connectors they are always hard to pull off and I'm always thinking its going to let go and my hand is going to fly into the power supply (ouch) or even worse into the cpu or some other critical part (fuck). hehe

I totally hear what your saying about a dedicated chip against a comptuer chip but i wouldn't say its too dedicated.
the emotion engine (so called cause it has the power to start bringing emotions into gaming) Can do a hell of alot Including Mpeg 2 decomressing and alot more probly. I may offend alot of people but I think PC programmers are lazy and don't take the time to optimize the programs as much as console programers How else do the console games get better everyyear? How else did they put quake2 on the playstation?

Yes you could do alot with an athlon but I don't know if you could do as much as the emotion engine does. I don't have the athlon specs handy but a dirrect comparison would show the PSX2 coming out ahead i'm pretty sure.

posted 01-31- 09:46 PM               

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Mirthain=FC=

posted 02-01- 12:27 AM               

Nope i think his point (at least in his last message) was that a console chip is designed to game and a computer chip is designed to be flexible. Which is true to a certain level but it gets to be an excuse after awhile. The OS thing is a great point to bring up. I personally think the WINOS is way overloaded and full of crap. There is no reason that it should take up as much overhead as it does. I would gladly live with a much simpler OS if it would let me run games on a p233.

I run Litestep cause its a little lighter on the ram and cause its a much more logical system. I would love for a gaming OS one that was designed for ease of programming games and giving great access to the hardware from within the game and also optimized for crazy low overhead (ala consoles).

posted 02-01- 11:32 AM               

That crazy.
Will that work with anything? Like you could set SDOE=shell (can't remember the command) and it would start up with windows and run better?

Explain it a little better.

posted 02-04- 07:26 PM            

Re: Organic Computing - It's a novel idea with alot of promise but has some serious drawbacks. First off, the possibility for bacterial infection and true viruses in any organic system. You'd hate to catch a cold and kill your system - literally - now wouldn't you. The other problem would be longevity and maintenence - take a house plant for instance, if you fail to water it or it doesnt get the correct soil PH it will die in short order - same problem would apply to an organic computer. All organics have to 'eat' to live and are suceptable to aging and disease. These are major hurdles to organic computing - but they will probably be solved eventualy, but I still think it is several decades off.

Shell command -

The shell command decides what the front end of Windows is, the user-interface part. You can use almost any executable as the shell but the results of doing so can be unpredictable. It is in fact possible with with 95 (not sure about 98) to have it use to old 3.1 interface - which while a bit clunky by todays standards uses 70% less resources than windows explorer (the default 95/98 front end).

If you use something that isn't capable of launching an external program (like FS) you will need to reboot into command prompt mode to change the shell back to Explorer. To do this in 95 press F8 when you see the 'Starting Windows 95' prompt. In 98 hold down the left CTRL key while booting. These steps will bring up the boot menu - pick 'Command Prompt Only' from the list. Use the trusty old EDIT program to change the System.ini back to it's original state (or whatever ).

The place to edit this is in the System.ini file under the [Boot] heading. Shell=Explorer.exe

If you use a file that is not in the windows directory specify the full path and also make sure that the directory where the file resides is in the path statement - not having this dir. in the path can lead to unpredictable results. Doing any of the above can lead to unpredictable results.

DO THE ABOVE AT YOUR OWN RISK!!! If your system fries it ain't my fault! You have been warned!

-Stark{GS} - (Yes, I am a professional computer geek... )

posted 02-04- 09:33 PM               

COol man thats pretty much what i was going to try.

Do you or anyone remember how to write batch files with choices in them?